The Six Suites

There are six rooms over the atelier and there will never be a seventh. Each has a window onto Wrenfield Row, a raised bed, a rug, and a door that shuts. One household to a room — your two dogs may share; your dog will never share with a stranger’s.

We do not have a kennel block, a play yard, or a group. Dogs here are walked individually four times a day and spend their evening in the front room with whoever is on the late shift, which is a person in an armchair with a book, not a webcam.

SIX ROOMS

The settling day

Before a first overnight, your dog spends a day here: arrives at eight, does the full routine, walks with the people who will be walking it in June, sleeps in the room it will sleep in, goes home at five. Forty dollars, and it is not optional.

The reason is simple. A dog’s first night away from home should not also be its first hour in a strange building with strangers. Almost every boarding problem we have ever had came from somewhere that skipped this step, and the dogs who have done a settling day walk upstairs on arrival without looking back.

What we will not take

We do not board dogs we have not groomed or met. We do not take a dog on its first night over Christmas or a public holiday — those weeks go to households we know, because those are the weeks when everything is fullest and there is least slack for a dog who is struggling. And we do not take entire males and females in the same building in the same week. Six rooms means we can say no, and we do.

Nightly notes

Every evening you get a short written note: what was eaten, where you walked, who was met on the Row, whether the night before was settled. No photographs. Dogs do not photograph well at eight in the evening, and a note that says he waited by the door for ten minutes and then gave up and slept tells you more than any picture would.